Hot topics in May

Let rip!

TEXT EMILY BARTELS

PHOTOS MALTE JÄGER

Forget yoga – break something, says Guido Dodero. Smash a couple of bottles and watch the shards fly; it helps to actually observe the destruction in progress. Dodero founded the Break Club in Buenos Aires with the idea of entertaining, diverting and providing a kind of therapy for his fellow human beings. At the Break Club, you pay for the privilege of smashing things to bits with total impunity inside a darkened room. It costs roughly 25 euros to reduce an old computer screen and 20 glass bottles to smithereens. Quite a lot of money, you say? Maybe. But maybe not, considering that people have been known to fling their 1000-euro-smartphone against the wall. Anger hast to have some kind of vent.

Bent on destruction: Our reporter experienced the joyful release of a controlled freak-out in Buenos Aires

It’s a shame I’m not the least bit angry when I enter the Break Club. Dodero and I discuss the appropriate music to listen while raging – Led Zeppelin. We talk about Buenos Aires, where a higher than average number of psychologists lives and works. It is a coincidence that he started the Break Club here? I choose my weapon. For the television, I pick a hammer that sits good and heavy in my hand. I try to feel loathing for the set in front of me, try to project a face I dislike onto its gray, dusty screen – and give it a whack. Plastic splinters fly against my face shield. Glass shatters, but I feel no loss of control. Instead, I feel a surge of pleasure that lingers – at this absurd moment, at doing something so out of the ordinary and at the curiosity that fills me after a couple more whacks, when the TV’s interior comes to light. I experience an epiphany: So this is what a cathode ray tube television looks like on the inside! thebreakclub.com

Getting there

Lufthansa flies daily from Frankfurt (FRA) to Buenos Aires (EZE) in January. Us the app to calculate your miles: www.miles-and-more.com/app